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﻿This is a rare unit. I’ve never seen nor heard of an Alps Electric hard drive (this one branded Solidway). The drive uses an oddball floppy berg-style connector for power instead of the “molex”, and has very few markings on it as for indications of size or geometry. This is a big problem, because way back in these days, you needed to know the Cylinder/Head/Sectors per Track layout of a drive in order to read and boot from it. Anyway, lucky the internet had a solution for me – very rare to find one for such old gear: it was a 211Mb drive with translated geometries of 527/16/49 or 732/16/35. It had a 128kB cache, and a 150,000 hour MTBF (low by modern standards). It was a 3448RPM drive with a 13ms seek time (oddball spindle speeds were common back then). Also interesting to note was that keyed connectors to prevent reversed insertion were uncommon – so people breaking their drives by reversing or misaligning their cables were not unheard of. Connector shrouds and keying have gone a long way into making the computer building experience more like lego.

Realistically, you're going to need to get that computer to boot in order to get the data off, it's unlikely that that interface is going to be compatible with a modern computer with any amount of ease (as in you'd probably need to work on creating hardware and software to get it working)

I'd suggest posting up on the Vintage Computer Forums, see if anyone there has that model and perhaps they have a good idea on where to start getting the data off.

It's almost certainly more trouble than it's worth, but could be a fun project if you're into this sort of stuff.

Getting this machine to boot is impossible. Quite a lot of old resistors broke off in the process of getting the drive out, and also the screen is not connected anymore.

I appreciate the effort. I'll relay your findings to my superiors and let them decide the next step. I wouldn't know where to start with this. Even if I got it up and running I wouldn't know how to copy data from it. Except maybe to/from floppy, but I don't have any floppies either. Haha.

Getting this machine to boot is impossible. Quite a lot of old resistors broke off in the process of getting the drive out, and also the screen is not connected anymore.

I appreciate the effort. I'll relay your findings to my superiors and let them decide the next step. I wouldn't know where to start with this. Even if I got it up and running I wouldn't know how to copy data from it. Except maybe to/from floppy, but I don't have any floppies either. Haha.

We'll probably trash it.

I assume that this has been sitting for at least 10 years.

If the files weren't important during that time they're not important now ;)

Maybe take a different approach, research the motherboard and see what interface(s) it has.

I was always under the impression that SCSI was always 50 pins internally, but it's not out of the questions that it'd have been cut down.

Just for clarity on the 50 pin scsi (1) half the pins are ground, actually every other strand on the 50 conductor cable is ground to reduce crosstalk. Most of the world only used 50 pin cables, except for apple and sun for a time. Both designs were dropped because of comparability reasons.

There was a Youtube video posted a while back where a guy built a USB interface and hooked up a drive from the 70's. The process was more of a learning experience but he said now that he had done it he could see a possibility for a commercial use for plug and play support with old vintage drives. The issue in this post is exactly what he talked about too, the need to pull data from a drive with no other support. he used linux to access it because linux has "Anything as a file" support, I cannot remember the name of the video or the post here on SW, there was no how-to included but maybe some research would turn something up.

Knowing all that, I was not aware they actually made other electronic components. Knowing their past with old Mac's, that is where I would have expected it to come from. And considering their somewhat unique way of doing things (ie. reinventing the wheel when something already exists) I'm not surprised to see something Alps with a strange connector.